Welcome to our Instagram growth and engagement study for the month of November 2017. This is your look at the latest trends on the platform.

We also look at all the latest news and features that you should know about and take advantage of in your Instagram marketing.

Let’s get started.

An increase in follower growth and engagement

• Follower growth in November was at 0.07% of the total audience. This is an increase compared to the 0.05% growth in October.
• Brands posted just over 3 times per day on average in November with 81% of all posts being images.
• Post engagement rate was at 0.9%. This also is a jump compared to the 0.7% ER in October. Photo posts engaged 1% of the audience on average while videos engaged 0.7%.

25 million Instagram Business Profiles

Several interesting stats have been released by Instagram during the month. Let’s take a look at them.

An interesting fact is that almost 50% of all business profiles don’t link out to an external website. They are Instagram only and are natively born. Or these businesses have simply forgotten to include their website link? Make sure that’s not you. As we saw in our study last month, almost 5% of all profile views result in a website click. Adding a link is an easy way of getting a bump in your website traffic.

More than 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business and 200 million users visit a business profile each day. Two-thirds of these visits come from people who don’t follow the profile.

Lots of updates to the Instagram stories

Instagram has introduced a feature many social media managers have asked for. You can now add pictures and videos from your camera roll to your Instagram stories. You no longer have to use content created at the moment, but can post pre-edited content and content that’s older than 24 hours too. You can now also post stories from the mobile web. All this makes it a little bit easier to work on the platform and still reap the rewards of Stories.

Now you can also keep your stories around for more than 24 hours by grouping them into Stories Highlights and featuring them on your profile. This is prominently presented on your Instagram profile and can serve as an archive of your best and most popular content. It’s also a great introduction to new visitors and can get them hooked on your content faster.

Last but not least stories do not disappear anymore but get automatically saved in the Stories Archive. This feature can be turned off in the settings but will be very useful for all businesses. All the stories content can be kept after the 24 hours and can be viewed, added to the Stories highlights and even be reposted again at a later date.

The ability to follow hashtags rather than people

One test that’s being experimented with right now is the ability for users to follow hashtags rather than people only. By following a particular hashtag, you will get access to the top posts and recent stories relevant to the hashtag directly in your feed. This might be a really useful way of following events or other topics that you are interested in. And it brings even more value to hashtags. Businesses should choose them well and use them to further distribute their content.

The native Regram button is being tested

TNW has collected a list of several other new features that Instagram is working on right now. These may never be released to all users globally but are being experimented with and if found successful would see a wider rollout.

The biggest of these is the native regram button. This has been on the wish list of social media managers for a very long time. It would make it so much easier for followers to reshare the best content to their friends and it may bring a boost to the organic reach of brands that post amazing content. The organic reach and follower growth have been decreasing over the last few months and this may just be a way to regain some of that without the use of paid advertising.